Originally posted by Kyleran No, you are missing the point. In this case we're talking about the sort of consequences that makes the player really reconsider whether or not it is worth the risk to even attempt the boss, and should we prove not up to the task the game really makes us regret our poor decision. Experience loss, items destroyed or damaged, deleveling, and long runs back may seem over the top to you, but for some of us, overcoming them makes the gameplay more rewarding. Sort of like the difference of playing poker for real money vs only for free chips. Still the same game, but the much higher stakes are what gives the former it's real appeal.
Well the OP led his post with the idea that you can "fail your way until you have the best gear." That has nothing to do with penalty, it's just flat-out a wrong statement.
You can't fail your way through a well-designed MMORPG. Your decisions have meaning and consequence, even if that consequence is a quick reset. A quick reset is all it takes for your decisions to have meaning and consequence.
Certainly nobody can disagree with you if you say you enjoy games with excessive penalty more than those without it, but most players don't seek punishment from games. The point of games for them isn't to experience punishment, but to experience interesting challenges or experiences. Seeking punishment always felt like an oddly masochistic way to play videogames, but to each his own.
I wouldn't call it a masochistic way of playing.. I find it more of a challenge and a fantasy check in play style.. I can not begin to count how many times in so many games that people RUN through camps of mobs without dieing because they know the mobs will reset before killing them.. Games today have a "gung ho" type of feel.. I think poker play with REAL money is a perfect example Kyl gave.. If that was such a bad example Las Vegas wouldn't exist.. But then there are a lot of fake money poker games today too.. I have one on my smart phone.. LOL
There is a reason why you don't speed thru a school zone at 100mph.. The consequences are tremendous, that doesn't mean we are masochistic society.. I guess the real question is , how high do you raise to bar? In my days of playing EQ, I felt more reward escaping sure death with less then 20 hit points, then any boss I defeated in WoW after dieing 20 times..
When risk vs reward is so out of control that there is no risk and it's all reward and you can just buy the carrot (stick not included) in the cash shop there are no consequences. Failing all by itself is considered the consequence, there is no penalty. This leads to no challenge and just throwing rewards at your players. Gold stars for showing up, oh joy.
"You CAN'T buy ships for RL money." - MaxBacon
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Certainly nobody can disagree with you if you say you enjoy games with excessive penalty more than those without it, but most players don't seek punishment from games. The point of games for them isn't to experience punishment, but to experience interesting challenges or experiences. Seeking punishment always felt like an oddly masochistic way to play videogames, but to each his own.
Well said.
I enjoy a challenge in video games, not punishment.
There are plenty of challenges without punishment in genres other than MMOs. D3 is challenging with almost zero punishment (if you play soft-core). FPS like DIshonored has zero punishment but hard difficulty option is challenging to get through. Point & click adventures like Testament of Sherlock Holmes requires you to think (that is, if you don't look up the solution on the internet) to solve the puzzles but it has no punishment except you can get stuck.
Now that would be the biggest leap in the MMO world today if you ask me. I find it totally meaningless to not even have to read the quest info cause you just know there is no consuquence involded completing it. What a shame.
You want Consequences (with a manly capital "C", chest thump). Corporation wants money from all of the Little Johnnies with mama's credit card.
These two concepts are, at times, in direct diametric opposition.
Guess which ideal wins whenever they come into conflict?
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
I wouldn't call it a masochistic way of playing.. I find it more of a challenge and a fantasy check in play style.. I can not begin to count how many times in so many games that people RUN through camps of mobs without dieing because they know the mobs will reset before killing them.. Games today have a "gung ho" type of feel.. I think poker play with REAL money is a perfect example Kyl gave.. If that was such a bad example Las Vegas wouldn't exist.. But then there are a lot of fake money poker games today too.. I have one on my smart phone.. LOL
There is a reason why you don't speed thru a school zone at 100mph.. The consequences are tremendous, that doesn't mean we are masochistic society.. I guess the real question is , how high do you raise to bar? In my days of playing EQ, I felt more reward escaping sure death with less then 20 hit points, then any boss I defeated in WoW after dieing 20 times..
But it's not more of a challenge.
Challenge is the skill requirement to avoid failure.
Penalty is what happens if you fail.
So a harsh penalty has virtually no impact on the amount of challenge involved; virtually no impact on the skill involved.
Certainly I agree that there should be more ways to experience interesting challenges in world gameplay, but that doesn't involve adding more penalty. What it means is adding more challenge (but in an optional way which doesn't disrupt the existing easy world content, because that's the challenge sweet spot for some players.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
You want Consequences (with a manly capital "C", chest thump). Corporation wants money from all of the Little Johnnies with mama's credit card.
These two concepts are, at times, in direct diametric opposition.
Guess which ideal wins whenever they come into conflict?
Corporations also want the (much bigger) pile of money from game-playing adults, who aren't interested in punishment-focused games. Heck, many of them aren't even interested in challenge-focused games.
The idea that mainly kids want gameplay which isn't punishment-focused is laughable. Virtually everyone wants it.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Challenge is the skill requirement to avoid failure.
Penalty is what happens if you fail.
So a harsh penalty has virtually no impact on the amount of challenge involved; virtually no impact on the skill involved.
Certainly I agree that there should be more ways to experience interesting challenges in world gameplay, but that doesn't involve adding more penalty. What it means is adding more challenge (but in an optional way which doesn't disrupt the existing easy world content, because that's the challenge sweet spot for some players.)
In games where people actually can get affected by what other people do, penalty can add challenge.
The Multiplayer Online Game "Path of Exile" illustrates it very well. It has two main modes: standard and hardcore. If you die in standard, you simply lose experience, if you die in hardcore you practically lose your character.
This leads to several consequences:
1. The gear obtainable through the market is significantely worse in hardcore compared standard. This indirectly makes the content more difficult for people playing in hardcore since they deal less damage and can tank less.
2. Farming for crafting materials is far easier in standard compared to hardcore, because there is no risk of losing your character and therefore no risk of losing items whcih you spent a lot time crafting. This means that standard player can farm crafting materials faster than hardcore players can, because they are able to do far more "reckless" plays which in hardcore would be far too risky to do. This indirectly makes content in hardcore more challenging due to worse gear.
3. Dps->ressurect->dps strategies are viable in standard against bosses or other difficult content, that tool is not available in hardcore and therefore the content is harder.
4. People are able to play more hours on a row in standard without having to take break for the day due to tiredness. In hardcore, the risk isn't worth it. This makes it more challenging to level up and gain crafting materials in hardcore.
As a conclusion, it stands that making your character as powerful as possible is a significantely more challenging task to do in hardcore compared to standard.
I wouldn't call it a masochistic way of playing.. I find it more of a challenge and a fantasy check in play style.. I can not begin to count how many times in so many games that people RUN through camps of mobs without dieing because they know the mobs will reset before killing them.. Games today have a "gung ho" type of feel.. I think poker play with REAL money is a perfect example Kyl gave.. If that was such a bad example Las Vegas wouldn't exist.. But then there are a lot of fake money poker games today too.. I have one on my smart phone.. LOL
There is a reason why you don't speed thru a school zone at 100mph.. The consequences are tremendous, that doesn't mean we are masochistic society.. I guess the real question is , how high do you raise to bar? In my days of playing EQ, I felt more reward escaping sure death with less then 20 hit points, then any boss I defeated in WoW after dieing 20 times..
The weird thing about using poker as an analogy in this is that the big poker tournaments all avoid additional consequences of failure. You pay your buy-in at the beginning and everything afterwards is purely skill based. The only punishment for eliination is that you do not win the big price. You do no have to pay more money if you get eliminated early.
Frankly, people who need harsh consequences in their videogames seem to lack the motivation to challenge themselves. Instead of striving to become better players they need outside pressure to convince them to do their best. When I play poker for fake money, I try my hardest to win and am sorely dissapointed when I lose. I tend to pity people who need to play for real money to reach that level of motivation.
I wouldn't call it a masochistic way of playing.. I find it more of a challenge and a fantasy check in play style.. I can not begin to count how many times in so many games that people RUN through camps of mobs without dieing because they know the mobs will reset before killing them.. Games today have a "gung ho" type of feel.. I think poker play with REAL money is a perfect example Kyl gave.. If that was such a bad example Las Vegas wouldn't exist.. But then there are a lot of fake money poker games today too.. I have one on my smart phone.. LOL
There is a reason why you don't speed thru a school zone at 100mph.. The consequences are tremendous, that doesn't mean we are masochistic society.. I guess the real question is , how high do you raise to bar? In my days of playing EQ, I felt more reward escaping sure death with less then 20 hit points, then any boss I defeated in WoW after dieing 20 times..
The weird thing about using poker as an analogy in this is that the big poker tournaments all avoid additional consequences of failure. You pay your buy-in at the beginning and everything afterwards is purely skill based. The only punishment for eliination is that you do not win the big price. You do no have to pay more money if you get eliminated early.
Frankly, people who need harsh consequences in their videogames seem to lack the motivation to challenge themselves. Instead of striving to become better players they need outside pressure to convince them to do their best. When I play poker for fake money, I try my hardest to win and am sorely dissapointed when I lose. I tend to pity people who need to play for real money to reach that level of motivation.
If you were talking exclusively about single player games, I would agree with you, but when it comes to multiplayer games where actions of people affect other people (like though an economy), it is not that simple.
In games where people actually can get affected by what other people do, penalty can add challenge.
But penalty is the only, nor the desirable (to many) way to add challenge.
Even in D3, which has a perma-death mode, it is entirely optional. No penalty can be harsher than that. In addition, no one can claim the soft-core has no challenge. It has the same challenge, just not the same penalty.
I wouldn't call it a masochistic way of playing.. I find it more of a challenge and a fantasy check in play style.. I can not begin to count how many times in so many games that people RUN through camps of mobs without dieing because they know the mobs will reset before killing them.. Games today have a "gung ho" type of feel.. I think poker play with REAL money is a perfect example Kyl gave.. If that was such a bad example Las Vegas wouldn't exist.. But then there are a lot of fake money poker games today too.. I have one on my smart phone.. LOL
There is a reason why you don't speed thru a school zone at 100mph.. The consequences are tremendous, that doesn't mean we are masochistic society.. I guess the real question is , how high do you raise to bar? In my days of playing EQ, I felt more reward escaping sure death with less then 20 hit points, then any boss I defeated in WoW after dieing 20 times..
But it's not more of a challenge.
Challenge is the skill requirement to avoid failure.
Penalty is what happens if you fail.
So a harsh penalty has virtually no impact on the amount of challenge involved; virtually no impact on the skill involved.
Certainly I agree that there should be more ways to experience interesting challenges in world gameplay, but that doesn't involve adding more penalty. What it means is adding more challenge (but in an optional way which doesn't disrupt the existing easy world content, because that's the challenge sweet spot for some players.)
Obviously you have a different definition of challenge.. NOT DIEING is one in my book, and if you trivialize dieing to nothing, it means nothing.. Hence = NO challenge..
If you were talking exclusively about single player games, I would agree with you, but when it comes to multiplayer games where actions of people affect other people (like though an economy), it is not that simple.
Not when the interactions are limited and well defined, like in many MMOs.
- trade in AH ... does not impact challenge level at all.
- LFD/LFR (where most pve multi-player gameplay is in) ... others do affect the challenge, but not penalty. And you can always quit when you meet a group you don't like.
- pvp (BG & arena) ... no penalty is needed to realize the challenge in beating others. A simple ELO type ranking/matching system will give everyone appropriate challenges.
In games where people actually can get affected by what other people do, penalty can add challenge.
But penalty is the only, nor the desirable (to many) way to add challenge.
Even in D3, which has a perma-death mode, it is entirely optional. No penalty can be harsher than that. In addition, no one can claim the soft-core has no challenge. It has the same challenge, just not the same penalty.
The goal of Path of Exile is to become as powerful as possible. You can grind experiencel, play the market, grind mobs for drops, etc, but it all comes down to that goal. Surely some people just play to beat the PvE in one form once and then quit, but the game was not really meant for those people in the first place.
Standard mode has significantely less challenge when it comes to achieving that main goal.
If you were talking exclusively about single player games, I would agree with you, but when it comes to multiplayer games where actions of people affect other people (like though an economy), it is not that simple.
Not when the interactions are limited and well defined, like in many MMOs.
- trade in AH ... does not impact challenge level at all.
- LFD/LFR (where most pve multi-player gameplay is in) ... others do affect the challenge, but not penalty. And you can always quit when you meet a group you don't like.
- pvp (BG & arena) ... no penalty is needed to realize the challenge in beating others. A simple ELO type ranking/matching system will give everyone appropriate challenges.
Yeah, if the MMO isn't designed in a certain way, all a stricter death penalty does is to punish and basically nothing else.
In games where people actually can get affected by what other people do, penalty can add challenge.
But penalty is the only, nor the desirable (to many) way to add challenge.
Even in D3, which has a perma-death mode, it is entirely optional. No penalty can be harsher than that. In addition, no one can claim the soft-core has no challenge. It has the same challenge, just not the same penalty.
The goal of Path of Exile is to become as powerful as possible. You can grind experiencel, play the market, grind mobs for drops, etc, but it all comes down to that goal. Surely some people just play to beat the PvE in one form once and then quit, but the game was not really meant for those people in the first place.
Standard mode has significantely less challenge when it comes to achieving that main goal.
I don't disagree. D3 is the same. The market in hardcore is very different than the market in softcore, so better items are harder to get.
However, if you limit the discussion to combat challenges because of mechanics, the penalty has no effect.
Obviously you have a different definition of challenge.. NOT DIEING is one in my book, and if you trivialize dieing to nothing, it means nothing.. Hence = NO challenge..
Avoiding death is pretty much exactly what I said challenge was.
All of the skill necessary to avoid death is challenge.
Whatever happens after death is penalty.
Let's say you invest 100,000 hours into a game, and you're level 100. If you fight a level 1 monster, there's just about zero challenge. If I then increase the death penalty to "The game uninstalls, your character is deleted from the game server, and your account is billed $200" then that fight still isn't challenging. Even adding the most extreme penalty possible, the challenge involved -- the skill required to beat that monster -- has not changed.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Obviously you have a different definition of challenge.. NOT DIEING is one in my book, and if you trivialize dieing to nothing, it means nothing.. Hence = NO challenge..
Avoiding death is pretty much exactly what I said challenge was.
All of the skill necessary to avoid death is challenge.
Whatever happens after death is penalty.
Let's say you invest 100,000 hours into a game, and you're level 100. If you fight a level 1 monster, there's just about zero challenge. If I then increase the death penalty to "The game uninstalls, your character is deleted from the game server, and your account is billed $200" then that fight still isn't challenging. Even adding the most extreme penalty possible, the challenge involved -- the skill required to beat that monster -- has not changed.
Exactly. And many games have good combat challenges. In fact, i doubt those who complains about "easy" mode MMO here can beat hard mode WOW raids.
Obviously you have a different definition of challenge.. NOT DIEING is one in my book, and if you trivialize dieing to nothing, it means nothing.. Hence = NO challenge..
Avoiding death is pretty much exactly what I said challenge was.
All of the skill necessary to avoid death is challenge.
Whatever happens after death is penalty.
Let's say you invest 100,000 hours into a game, and you're level 100. If you fight a level 1 monster, there's just about zero challenge. If I then increase the death penalty to "The game uninstalls, your character is deleted from the game server, and your account is billed $200" then that fight still isn't challenging. Even adding the most extreme penalty possible, the challenge involved -- the skill required to beat that monster -- has not changed.
Exactly. And many games have good combat challenges. In fact, i doubt those who complains about "easy" mode MMO here can beat hard mode WOW raids.
I actually think most never even tried, and are just following the popular "WoW hate" bandwagon.
Which is probably why their opinions are pretty much ignored by devs. Blizz knows exactly how many tries what raids, and the failure rates, and i bet they tune difficulties accordingly.
About the whole MMO genre has become to a point where you can 'fail' your way until you have the best gear. Ridiculous. And this is even without any consuequences whatsoever.
When in the world will the genre add these options where you HAVE to make a choice which have some dire consuequnce for your character? The option of slaying 20 bears for a hungry family is't actually like there can be anything wrong done. I cant' remember the last time I bothered to read the quests info; cause they have no meaning anyway:
-Go to pt B, kill X amounts of the mobs Y, return to point A to get your reward. Oh, how refreshingly challenging.
I had a long time break from one of the biggest MMO's while I tried to play some other MMO's. I went back to the "Behemoth" of MMO's purely for having some world PvP experience. Me and a group of friends started out, doing instances to get us some levels until we felt we had enough tools to be competetive in (world) PvP. Well, I was able to hang in the instances for a few rounds and the I smacked into the wall of boringless becasue it all was just the same all over again and agan, like a nightmare on a repeat.
Today it seems that most of them MMO gamers I know is in the same boat; they play their old (mostly the first MMO they got into) mostly out of good old memories.
Now, will the genre EVER be able to get us any option ingame where we have to take any hard decision which affects the characters standing, against factions or even with a decision that could have us kicked out of a main capital because we are not wanted there anymore?
Now that would be the biggest leap in the MMO world today if you ask me. I find it totally meaningless to not even have to read the quest info cause you just know there is no consuquence involded completing it. What a shame.
Posting in a WoW is dying thread
Lots of games have mechanics other than kill 10 boars
Why did you delete yourself?
I sometimes make spelling and grammar errors but I don't pretend it's because I'm using a phone
Comments
I wouldn't call it a masochistic way of playing.. I find it more of a challenge and a fantasy check in play style.. I can not begin to count how many times in so many games that people RUN through camps of mobs without dieing because they know the mobs will reset before killing them.. Games today have a "gung ho" type of feel.. I think poker play with REAL money is a perfect example Kyl gave.. If that was such a bad example Las Vegas wouldn't exist.. But then there are a lot of fake money poker games today too.. I have one on my smart phone.. LOL
There is a reason why you don't speed thru a school zone at 100mph.. The consequences are tremendous, that doesn't mean we are masochistic society.. I guess the real question is , how high do you raise to bar? In my days of playing EQ, I felt more reward escaping sure death with less then 20 hit points, then any boss I defeated in WoW after dieing 20 times..
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/Only for some. If the genre is so grey, why would the number of player, and the size of the market growing?
Well said.
I enjoy a challenge in video games, not punishment.
There are plenty of challenges without punishment in genres other than MMOs. D3 is challenging with almost zero punishment (if you play soft-core). FPS like DIshonored has zero punishment but hard difficulty option is challenging to get through. Point & click adventures like Testament of Sherlock Holmes requires you to think (that is, if you don't look up the solution on the internet) to solve the puzzles but it has no punishment except you can get stuck.
MMOs should learn from these other genres.
You want Consequences (with a manly capital "C", chest thump). Corporation wants money from all of the Little Johnnies with mama's credit card.
These two concepts are, at times, in direct diametric opposition.
Guess which ideal wins whenever they come into conflict?
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
But it's not more of a challenge.
Certainly I agree that there should be more ways to experience interesting challenges in world gameplay, but that doesn't involve adding more penalty. What it means is adding more challenge (but in an optional way which doesn't disrupt the existing easy world content, because that's the challenge sweet spot for some players.)
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Corporations also want the (much bigger) pile of money from game-playing adults, who aren't interested in punishment-focused games. Heck, many of them aren't even interested in challenge-focused games.
The idea that mainly kids want gameplay which isn't punishment-focused is laughable. Virtually everyone wants it.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
In games where people actually can get affected by what other people do, penalty can add challenge.
The Multiplayer Online Game "Path of Exile" illustrates it very well. It has two main modes: standard and hardcore. If you die in standard, you simply lose experience, if you die in hardcore you practically lose your character.
This leads to several consequences:
1. The gear obtainable through the market is significantely worse in hardcore compared standard. This indirectly makes the content more difficult for people playing in hardcore since they deal less damage and can tank less.
2. Farming for crafting materials is far easier in standard compared to hardcore, because there is no risk of losing your character and therefore no risk of losing items whcih you spent a lot time crafting. This means that standard player can farm crafting materials faster than hardcore players can, because they are able to do far more "reckless" plays which in hardcore would be far too risky to do. This indirectly makes content in hardcore more challenging due to worse gear.
3. Dps->ressurect->dps strategies are viable in standard against bosses or other difficult content, that tool is not available in hardcore and therefore the content is harder.
4. People are able to play more hours on a row in standard without having to take break for the day due to tiredness. In hardcore, the risk isn't worth it. This makes it more challenging to level up and gain crafting materials in hardcore.
As a conclusion, it stands that making your character as powerful as possible is a significantely more challenging task to do in hardcore compared to standard.
The weird thing about using poker as an analogy in this is that the big poker tournaments all avoid additional consequences of failure. You pay your buy-in at the beginning and everything afterwards is purely skill based. The only punishment for eliination is that you do not win the big price. You do no have to pay more money if you get eliminated early.
Frankly, people who need harsh consequences in their videogames seem to lack the motivation to challenge themselves. Instead of striving to become better players they need outside pressure to convince them to do their best. When I play poker for fake money, I try my hardest to win and am sorely dissapointed when I lose. I tend to pity people who need to play for real money to reach that level of motivation.
If you were talking exclusively about single player games, I would agree with you, but when it comes to multiplayer games where actions of people affect other people (like though an economy), it is not that simple.
But penalty is the only, nor the desirable (to many) way to add challenge.
Even in D3, which has a perma-death mode, it is entirely optional. No penalty can be harsher than that. In addition, no one can claim the soft-core has no challenge. It has the same challenge, just not the same penalty.
Obviously you have a different definition of challenge.. NOT DIEING is one in my book, and if you trivialize dieing to nothing, it means nothing.. Hence = NO challenge..
Not when the interactions are limited and well defined, like in many MMOs.
- trade in AH ... does not impact challenge level at all.
- LFD/LFR (where most pve multi-player gameplay is in) ... others do affect the challenge, but not penalty. And you can always quit when you meet a group you don't like.
- pvp (BG & arena) ... no penalty is needed to realize the challenge in beating others. A simple ELO type ranking/matching system will give everyone appropriate challenges.
The goal of Path of Exile is to become as powerful as possible. You can grind experiencel, play the market, grind mobs for drops, etc, but it all comes down to that goal. Surely some people just play to beat the PvE in one form once and then quit, but the game was not really meant for those people in the first place.
Standard mode has significantely less challenge when it comes to achieving that main goal.
Yeah, if the MMO isn't designed in a certain way, all a stricter death penalty does is to punish and basically nothing else.
I don't disagree. D3 is the same. The market in hardcore is very different than the market in softcore, so better items are harder to get.
However, if you limit the discussion to combat challenges because of mechanics, the penalty has no effect.
Avoiding death is pretty much exactly what I said challenge was.
All of the skill necessary to avoid death is challenge.
Whatever happens after death is penalty.
Let's say you invest 100,000 hours into a game, and you're level 100. If you fight a level 1 monster, there's just about zero challenge. If I then increase the death penalty to "The game uninstalls, your character is deleted from the game server, and your account is billed $200" then that fight still isn't challenging. Even adding the most extreme penalty possible, the challenge involved -- the skill required to beat that monster -- has not changed.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Exactly. And many games have good combat challenges. In fact, i doubt those who complains about "easy" mode MMO here can beat hard mode WOW raids.
Which is probably why their opinions are pretty much ignored by devs. Blizz knows exactly how many tries what raids, and the failure rates, and i bet they tune difficulties accordingly.
Posting in a WoW is dying thread
Lots of games have mechanics other than kill 10 boars
Why did you delete yourself?
I sometimes make spelling and grammar errors but I don't pretend it's because I'm using a phone